The Recipe for Turning Your Passion into Profits

The Recipe for Turning Your Passion into Profits with Jamie Geller [Transcript]

In our interview, Jamie shares her personal story, how she got started, and how she developed a passion and built a business around it. Pay attention to how Jamie explains the importance of looking at data and analytics, and seeing what’s working in your business and doubling down on it. Also, focus on the way Jamie explains how to approach a media outlet for a PR article. Finally, pay close attention to the practical tips Jamie shares for a working person, for work-life balance, and how you could make sure that none of that suffers. There’s so much in this interview, so many gold nuggets. Without further ado, here’s the interview.

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Jamie Geller, thank you for joining me on the Let’s Talk Business podcast.

It’s my pleasure. I’m excited to do this. Thank you.

I’ve known you for a while. We’ve crossed our path speaking about entrepreneurship. After viewing your official bio, I googled the Queen of Kosher and your name was everywhere.

Didn’t you know that?

For our readers, tell us a bit more of what you do.

I am the CEO and Founder of Kosher Network International which is a median marketing firm catering to kosher content across various digital platforms. We have a website and we have multiple social handles on Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. We do a lot of print projects as well, six cookbooks that we have under our belts. We have our newest venture which is a kosher meal kit delivery collaboration with JChef. It’s lots of fun things to do all and around the focus of kosher food.

Food is always exciting. Let’s go way back, obviously, the six kosher bestseller cookbooks didn’t come overnight. What got you into this space in the first place?

The subtitle of my first book which was called Quick And Kosher is Recipes From The Bride Who Knew Nothing. That was me, I didn’t know the difference between a spatula and a saucepan and I didn’t care. I was an award-winning TV producer. I worked for HBO and CNN. I did not grow up religious at all. My mother trained my sister and me to be professional corporate working women and not the Jewish term balabusta, that was not her dream for us, so much so that she aired the opposite side. When I got married, I had never cooked. I had used my oven in Manhattan for storage and I never turned it on. I was good at ordering out. I learned through trial and error. I learned on the job and that’s where my interest began.

Ultimately, at one point, you developed a passion for cooking.

I would say I’m much more passionate about feeding people than I am about cooking. That is why my recipes are always quick, simple and easy. My goal is to get you in and out of the kitchen as quick as possible. I love to feed, not just every Jewish mother but that’s this innate thing that we have as women or as people in this world. Food is an incredible unifier and I love entertaining. I love what the ritual of dinner time does to a family, similarly, what the Shabbat meal or Shabbat table does to the family. All these types of experiences are centered around food. My goal is like, “We need to eat. I love to eat. How do we make that process as simple as possible? How do we create these incredibly memorable family experiences in the easiest way possible?” That’s my passion.

I loved your answer, which is sometimes the passion could come from developing the product but sometimes that passion develops based on solving a problem. In this case, the feeding part, not so much the cooking part. The follow-up question to that would be how much would say that drive and passion has contributed to your constant push for the next venture?

I think my passion is entrepreneurship, that is what that does. Every day there are a million ideas, they’re huge ideas. There are two huge dreams I was thinking about sharing because you never know who’s reading. That’s what drives and that’s what drives to continue the growth. I always say, “I’m not a chef, I just play one on TV.” I’m an entrepreneur and this passion to feed and unify people, make people’s lives more delicious, meaningful, and joyous. That’s behind every single product that I put out. Whether it’s as simple as a cookbook or as large as this Kosher Meal Kit Service that we collaborated on and we’re delivering on 35 states or these other two dream projects. If I share them with you, you’ll see that the passion is greater than being in the kitchen.

[bctt tweet=”Food is an incredible unifier.” via=”no”]

Let’s hear it.

It’s going to be exclusive for you, Meny. The two big dreams I have, one is to open a fund which would allow us to invest in up and coming food startups. Everyone needs to know what they do well and what we do strongly is leverage our media and marketing, the machine and platforms we have built. We have 1.5 million followers. Our videos get over 500 million views. That’s 0.5 billion views and all the time what we do is essentially promoting incredible products that we integrate into our contents. We put our favorite olive oil into all of our recipes, our eBooks and videos. What I love to be able to do is invest at the early stage in these innovative food startups and entrepreneurs. Help leverage our media, market and platforms that we built to grow their products. We’re still giving time for the big companies, but all the excitement and innovation are happening with those smaller companies. That’s a big dream to have a fund like that. That is the first one.

We do have a lot of readers, maybe one person will pick it up and say, “Here I am, this is my information. Let’s start something.” Let’s go to number two.

Number two, in Israel the boys go to school essentially eleven months and one week of the year. There’s a three-week vacation, the three weeks in August. We make it a point to do all the touristy, fun family activities that we never get to do during the year. Not because they don’t have vacations but there are no Sundays in Israel. I visited the Kikar Hamusica which is like the music square in Ben Yehuda. I saw this incredible, hands-on music museum for families and people of all ages to understand Jewish history and culture through music. It took you on this tour of the world through musical rooms and musical instruments. It’s all set around this square where you see these incredible restaurants and they have musical performances every evening. I thought, “We should have something like that for food.” If you ever want to understand the culture or history and especially that of the wandering Jew, it’s through food. It tells so much of our story and because it’s such a unifier, I thought it would be an incredible opportunity to both educate and unify tourism, the Jewish people, and the greater world. That’s the second big dream.

There’s a line that people use, “Food makes the mood.” After you are in a good mood, there’s so much you can achieve. Let’s talk a little bit more about you as a businessperson, the entrepreneur, following your passion and what we just discussed. As an entrepreneur, we all suffer from the shiny object syndrome, let’s do this, let’s do that. How do you make sure you stay focused? You do it, maximize it and expand. I’ll elaborate a bit, you mentioned before the 500 million video views, that comes from focus, strategy and being out there consistently. How do you arrive at that focus?

You have to recognize your limitations. That shiny object syndrome is it’s so easy to jump from thing to thing, but especially for an entrepreneur, if you stay true to your budget and if you evaluate the resources you have. I have this list of dreams, I just shared two big ones with you but there are certainly a hundred other small in directions we want to go in. If I had a penny for every person that I’ve met that said, “You should do this, or you should do that.” We have thought of it all, but we have to stay realistic with the number of hours in the day and the work-life balance, the resources that we have, the budgets that we have. Sometimes, one of my favorite strategies is to double down on what is working as opposed to starting something new. Easily, I never have a problem scratching something, I’ve gotten rid of the ego, I’ve had to a long time ago. I’ve had to publicly scrap large projects that were not working and didn’t make sense. There are such things as loss leaders but sometimes, you can’t take anymore.

It’s that combination of being true to your limitations, resources and budget. To not having that ego of always having to do something. These dreams that I’ve shared with you, one is after I went to Kikar Hamusica, one is quite old and I’m only now at the point of starting to put it out there and hope to realize it. I sat on it for a bit because it wasn’t the right time yet. Whether we weren’t big enough or we didn’t yet have the resources to expand. There are a lot of factors that keep us from that shiny object syndrome.

You touched on two important points for our readers that are worth repeating. First of all is the importance of recognizing your limitations. As leaders, we sometimes fall short on that, ultimately we end up failing. You can be stretched thin on all different sides, if there’s a resource limitation, financial limitation, skillset limitation or whatever it is, you have to know what you can and can’t do. That was a great point. The second point which I want to elaborate a bit more is you mentioned the concept of staying focused on what’s working and continuing to build on what is working. I can’t stress this enough and I speak to so many business owners, I ask them, “Close your eyes, tell me something you’re proud of what happened that last several months?” They will tell me this particular client that they were able to get. I ask them, “How did it happen?” He says, “I went to this trade show and I met him there.” I’ll ask, “How many shows have you gone to since?” He’d say, “None in a single one.” I ask him, “If this brought you joy and this is how you got your client, why don’t you do more of those?” We run to the next big thing and going back to the shiny object syndrome, a lot of it is because this is a new platform, this is a new idea, this is a new way of doing stuff. We forget that it’s all good but if you have something that’s working, just continue to do what’s working.

A friend said to me, “Your YouTube, why don’t you upload more? Why don’t you pay more attention to it?” The truth is Facebook is working for us. It’s working, that’s where 90% of the views come from and I mentioned 500 million views, that’s on Facebook. While YouTube is extremely hot and it is the place for video creators, it never took off for us in a way that Facebook did. We always like to make sure that we’re playing on platforms, we were heavily into YouTube first before Facebook tried to compete with them in terms of video content creators. About a few years ago, Facebook started to pay more attention to that, we dipped our toe in the water and tried. When Facebook started to take off, we doubled down on that. We didn’t close our YouTube channel, it’s there and we sporadically post, but we can’t be everywhere. I can’t also be on YouTube to the same extent that I am on Facebook, so we doubled down on what was working. We have to be open to trying things, even when something is the trendiest place for video creators, but we’re having success somewhere else. We have to embrace that and not swim upstream.

Let me ask you a follow-up question to this. Is this something that came naturally to you? Have you, as every entrepreneur, got burned certainly some time and said, “I have to double down on what’s working?”

You don’t know how many mistakes and how many pivots I’ve done. One of my investors and partners for many years, Henry Kauftheil, we’re always talking about the pivot. At one point I said to him, “I’m pivoting so much, I’m not standing still.” We had to make a turn and a change so many times, but you have to be open to that. That allows you not to get burned out. We’ve made mistakes, sometimes they’re financial mistakes, as a business owner that’s hard to swallow. Sometimes you’re burned out, you’re no longer passionate about a certain direction, so you have to be willing to wake up. Every day is a new day. If that means pivoting and realigning your business strategy, you have to be open to that to keep things going. There are lots of mistakes along the way.

What I like about it are the passion and the end results, you don’t pivot out of that. You pivot on the delivery, the medium of how we’re delivering, how you’re feeding that passion, delivering food for those millions of people.

[bctt tweet=”A very narrow focus is sometimes helpful. Once you realize you can’t be everything to everyone, you become an expert in your field.” via=”no”]

It’s not one day I’m like, “This is not working. We have to sell socks.” It’s all within the same space, but it’s tweaking. Sometimes it’s just the smallest tweak that can take a strategy, a goal, and a milestone from no chance to like, “We can meet and we can surpass that.”

You have to pay attention to market shifts. Especially, you’re in the content business, if the habits and how people will consume content changes, obviously, you can stay focused on how you did it for years, but that market has shifted the way people consume content.

When we’re talking in the digital space, it’s shifting overnight. The same strategy we had on Instagram months ago isn’t the same strategy now. Sometimes it’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s going on and what people are reacting to. The number thing that we do is we’re crazy about analytics, that’s how we know what’s working and what’s not working. It’s not just, “I’ve gotten a lot of comments.” We would look at how long people are looking at something? How much are they engaging with it? What’s their hang time on the video? Is it eliciting a further action to click through to the website, the eBook, the downloadable guide or the infographics? We look at infographics and they’re back in again. The content consumer and consumption market, especially in the digital space, is something you need to be on top of.

We always say that don’t assume things, the data doesn’t lie. If you analyze the data properly, you get a lot of good insights.

That’s an art in and of itself. Sometimes, we’ve analyzed data wrong then we made a slight tweak, we’re interested why this was so and we’re able to service the results better. It’s an art, data analysis and building a strategy based off of that.

Another topic that I wanted to cover, when you deliver content, the audience has to love the content otherwise they don’t connect. Obviously, there is the brand behind it and the delivery of the content as well. Nowadays with social media and the word influencers are being overused and abused by different people. Some people look at it because I have followers, the number of likes and comments. Some people look at quantity versus quality of people. My question to you, in your case, it’s a step further because you have your brand and then you have your personal brand. The business brand and the personal brand, we live in a world that people want all branding to become more personalized. People are connecting more to a person than just the brand. Even for Apple, that is a strong brand but it also had Steve Jobs, who was the icon of Apple. Now we see it coming back, even companies and brands that never had a personality to it. How do you see this space? How do you manage to have the business brand and the personal brand?

In my situation, they are one and the same because the brand is and what we built is Jamie Geller. I started as Jamie Geller, that’s my married name, but when I started in this whole industry, I went out there and one time I felt like, “It’s so narrow. What if everyone doesn’t like Jamie Geller? What if everyone doesn’t like quick-cooking?” We want to represent all Jewish food and we want the intricate recipes. As a result, we opened a brand called Joy of Kosher with Jamie Geller, but basically it’s Joy of Kosher. This way we could be everything to everyone. Things shifted, people wanted the brand to become more personal. People were connecting with brands that have more of a personal story. People are looking for emotional connections in the content they consume and the products they purchase. It wasn’t a gut feeling. It wasn’t a shift in the industry. Analytics said more people are searching on Google. How are they getting to our site? What is the brand they know more? Is it Joy of Kosher or is it Jamie Geller?

We spent time studying that and then we spent the next time after that making the URL change and preparing, solely changing over to the social profiles, changing over the URL. This was a two-and-a-half-year change in the making and go back to where we started and this big personal brand. For me, the question is how much do I let people in? Because the brand is my name and people want to connect personally, but there’s an issue now. It’s almost become reality TV. It’s almost too much. In an effort to become an influencer, years ago that was the word blogger, people are oversharing. That’s an interesting thing to have to navigate now.

How do you manage to build this whole business entity around a personal brand which is now a gated community, you have to watch who comes into your brand? How do you make sure that you’re able to outgrow yourself? Every business wants to outgrow the creator or founder so you have more leverage.

When we talk about business meetings and investors, people invest in the person as much as they do the idea. Sometimes it’s even more the person over the idea. I’ve sat in business meetings where people were like, “If Jamie Geller decides to retire or something much worse, what do we do?” The brand has to stand for something. My goal is, “Can I build something for my kids, my grandchildren to work in? Can I retire? Can the brand stand for something that it’s no longer the actual person?” As much as this name means something, I came from the non-Kosher world. I didn’t grow up religious. Sara Lee is a brand for cooking and baking. I never knew her. I don’t know if she was still alive when I started consuming those products, but Sara Lee meant X, Y and Z. That’s the goal when you’re dealing with a brand that’s named after someone. To make sure that it stands for something that’s so clear that anyone can be at the front of it. Until 120, everyone should be healthy and happy, but the brand needs to be able to outlive and outgrow the person.

It’s not about the personality of the person, but what they stand for.

Exactly, if you want to grow beyond.

[bctt tweet=”Any business owner wants the people who are working for them to be happy and healthy because they will be more productive.” via=”no”]

You mentioned your past history and even now you are involved outside of the Jewish community as far as reality TV. You’re a guest on different shows and others. How do you work with those editors? How do you manage the different relationships you have, specifically in sharing your stories? If you’re speaking about Kosher recipes for the Jewish mothers, it might be delivered one way. Now you’re going to the mass market and mainstream media, it might mean something else. How do you manage the messaging of what you do for different audiences?

Here’s a mistake we made along the way. At one point, thank God I love being on TV, we had these great relationships and I’ve been invited back many times through the same shows. We tried to start to pitch mainstream food content like if it’s summer, let’s do summer salads. Back to school, we want to share the quickest and most creative back to school lunch ideas for kids. As good as the TV spots were and as good as those relationships were, we never got booked for what I’ll call that vanilla mainstream evergreen content. We decided to double down on what we are expert in, that’s in Jewish food and entertaining for the holidays. Now, I can be an expert and in niche fields for mainstream markets. I am only invited on before Rosh Hashanah, Passover or Hanukkah. That’s the time of year. Now where the world has become a lot more politically correct and a lot more inclusive, in the beginning, no one was doing those spots, certainly not on national TV or they would do something small and token.

Now, it’s getting a lot more attention and as the world becomes more food eccentric, people of all ages are much more food enthusiasts. When I come on for Rosh Hashanah, I’m not just speaking to the religious Jewish community. I’m speaking to the broader Jewish community, speaking to those communities and people that are having Seders where perhaps not everyone is Jewish but they’re trying to cater to certain family members that might be celebrating the holidays, etc. Also, the non-Jewish people are obsessed with the challah and the brisket. The same way I love food of different cultures and ethnicities. We’re focusing on what our strength is and playing that up as a niche market to the mainstream audience.

This was great advice for anybody reading. Sometimes you think you have to go broader in order to gain attention. Sometimes, the more niche you go, the more attention it will get. It might be from different people but in your case it’s the mass market.

A very narrow focus is sometimes helpful. Once you realize you can’t be everything to everyone, you become an expert in your field, then you try to think about who are the different markets who would be interested. We have a nice Christian Evangelical following, it’s because they love Israel. Every time I do a recipe or travel to Israel, something Jerusalem-focused, I cook biblical food. I didn’t change but I just looked at what am I doing now that could appeal to a different market. Help broaden my market without changing what I’m an expert in. I’m looking at what other niche markets or demographics might be interested in what I’m already creating even though that happens to have a narrow focus.

What would you say to the person reading, thinking they would love to get some media attention? Based on your experience working with the media, working with PR firms and doing your own stuff, what would be the first step a person should do if they have a story to share?

You have to listen first. A lot of times we think, “The media will love this,” or “The show will love this,” or “This is the perfect story.” Often than not, what we think they’ll love, you won’t even get a callback. It will be like crickets when you do a pitch. You have to listen to the stories that they are already sharing, the type of coverage and content they’re already putting out there. What are the specific angles? At one point, the Today Show was doing a faith segment. They were interviewing different authors who were talking about their religious journey in all different religions. That was the time to pitch them a religious journey type of story, not a few months before and after. It was a limited ten-part series where they were focusing on different kinds of religious and spiritual journeys within different faiths. It has to be the right timing. You have to see the things that they are putting out there, whether you’re looking in a magazine, newspaper or TV. You have to mold your story, just little tweaks, to fit the things that they are reporting on.

The actual steps would be contacting a reporter.

It’s great to have a publicist. You can not underestimate what relationships mean in this industry. I’m not going to say cold calling is the same way as cold contact. It could work but that higher up publicist who already has those existing relationships, the first thing is you need someone to listen. If you don’t have relationships, you can’t imagine the number of pitches they get. I used to work on the assignment desk at CNN. I used to be pitched to all the time. The calls I would take and the emails I’d respond to first are the ones that I have this ongoing relationship with. You should hire a professional publicist that knows how to write a press release that’s compelling that would be picked up. Sometimes people want the scoop and sometimes they want to see that Yahoo picked that up, now you can come on the Today Show. They don’t want to be the first. A publicist who knows how to write a compelling press release and knows how to tweak the pitches. It only works when you work hand-in-hand in tandem so you’re sure that they are telling your story the right way. A professional publicist is a must if you want to make a media splash.

I want to move into one more topic that would be valuable for our readers, the concept of work-life balance. People can read books or they have their own way of looking at work-like balance. Who knows better what the work-life balance means or needs to look like than you, running a home with kids, being in and out of the kitchen, working on shows, traveling? Now, you live in Israel. You come to the States a lot. How do you look at work-life balance? How do you create your boundaries that one is not neglecting the other?

It’s hard, especially when you’re a business owner because the buck stops with you. When you work for anyone, you can set that up and advocate for yourself. Any business owner wants the people who are working for them to be happy and healthy because they will be that much productive. When you’re a small business owner or a large business, the fine line is hard to navigate. My compass point of reference is quality over quantity. I’m not going to make to everything. I’m not going to be there for every single dinner time, bedtime. If I made that promise to myself, I’m only going to feel guilty or guiltier than I already feel now. It’s not the case when you’re running a business that causes you to travel.

What I can do is make sure those moments are focused. I don’t bring my phone around the kids at all. I try to do at least a few times a week. It’s my goal every night but I don’t promise every night to do the special time. I have two kids per room, I go to that room and close out that room, either we tell a story or talk about the day, we say our special evening prayers together. It’s those moments without the distraction of the phone and focused on one to two kids and not all at once. Those are the things I strive for, and of course, Shabbat

and that break on the weekend, that’s what keeps everything together. That’s the secret.

[bctt tweet=”Smile at people. It’s a wonderful ice breaker.” via=”no”]

I appreciate you sharing the exact things that you implement. As a business owner myself, we all struggle with those things. I realized early on that it’s always quality over quantity. When you have a busy mother or father coming home, because they need to be home but they’re not really home. They’re head is not there and the phone is buzzing. Because they clocked in at 5:00, the kids are not feeling that. Versus I bring in my kids to the conversation saying, “The next few days, I’ll be out of town or I’ll be busy.” Sometimes even sharing, I shared a LinkedIn post that got over 35,000 views in a few days. I shared that, my fourteen-year-old asked me, “How was your day?” I decided I’m going to give him the full day, the good, the bad and the ugly. In the end, he pauses a second, he turns around and says, “It’s not that fun to work.” I was like, “It’s not, but I still love it every single day.”

The reason for it is when the kids start to become a little older, they understand. If you bring them to the conversation, you have to give them their time. They have to understand that in order to have those two quality days, I needed to work late or I needed to be out of town. By me, it could be once a week I walk with the kids and they feel that I’m looking out for that day. What I’m saying is that our culture, the concept of work-life balance, when you run a business there’s no perfect balance. However, you can perfectly balance it with those non-negotiables. That’s how I saw it. That’s why I loved hearing from you as a woman entrepreneur, somebody who is traveling a lot and raising a family, how you also look at work-life balance because it’s an important topic to be discussed.

It’s important and healthy. I’m happy that it’s prevalent in our culture because when I started and went to NYU and started working in New York, I was not religious. It was 24/7, what was celebrated by the culture then was how hard you worked until you burned out. Now, as a culture, we’re more celebrating this work-life balance. I’m embracing it. Thankfully, it came just in time. I’m a mother and have a family. We call it special time and kids look forward to that special time. The kids know that if we are going to a circus or those three weeks in the summer, that I work late nights the week leading up to that and they might not see me because we’re going to have the next week or two weeks together in a special way.

There’s one more practical tip that I want to share with people, I make sure to greet with such a happy, excited, warm smile. The kids that love to be hugged, I hug them. The kids that love a stroke on the cheek, something either physical if the kids love or something you do physically. That smile, that’s such a wonderful way if they leave with that and come home to that when you see them versus when we drag ourselves, we looked depressed and we look like the day that we had. All the kids do it now, when we walk in, we try to smile. That starts things. I love that.

That’s beautiful, parents to kids. It’s also an everyday greeting people. It came to my mind. I shop for my breakfast at a certain place. They switched out a person at the counter, the last few days I realized that every day after I take my breakfast, he tells me, “Good appetite. Hello. Good morning. Have a good day.” I walk out the store, I said, “I feel better.” It’s almost tempting to come back to that store because he was so nice other than just delivering the service. When we’re talking about entrepreneurs, when we talk about dealing with people, we deal with so many people, sometimes, you never know what’s going on with that person walking down the street with closed eyes and maybe thinking about something happening in his or her life. All of a sudden, you give them that excess smile, it goes such a long way.

As my daughter started high school, I had something that I taught her too. Smile at people, it will invite them to speak to you and you can speak to them. It’s that wonderful ice breaker. It’s inviting, as opposed to the opposite of being closed.

This has been amazing. I encourage you to follow her. The spirit, the tangible stuff, and the content you deliver are amazing. Let’s close with four rapid-fire questions. Are you ready?

I’m nervous now.

Number one, what is a book that changed your life?

I read The Story of Rebbetzin Henny Machlis book. This is a story about a woman who had love in children and hosted 100-plus people every weekend for Shabbat. I love that book.

Number two, a piece of advice you got that you’ll never forget.

Everything in moderation, from my grandmother.

Number three, any wish you could go back and do differently?

No, you can’t have regrets.

Last question, number four, what is still on your bucket list to achieve?

It is being here to see my great-grandchildren.

Jamie, thank you for joining us. I know your time is valuable, that’s why in the name of our readers, we will forever be grateful for sharing some of your time.

Thank you, Meny. It’s been such a joy.

It’s my pleasure. Thank you.